One of the unfortunately distinctive features of Catholic life today is the multiplication of various kinds of pragmatic (the more hopeful-sounding word is “prudential”) compromises one finds themselves making, or at least pushed towards making. Catholic parents, more burdened economically, and more duty-bound towards young and helpless earthly subjects, are no doubt affected in this way more than anyone: Dad must work for a company whose existence has an… ambiguously positive impact on the world; Mom cannot devote as much time to a prayer group as she once did. That’s just life. 

It is hard to quantify, but it may well be that the majority of parental compromises made by Catholics fall under the category of “education”. So much of a child’s life is, in one way or another, subsumed under the category of education. At the same time, so much of society has made education—even elite education—a purely pragmatic issue, oriented towards credentialism, or an entirely functional matter of helping students more efficiently reach essentially random goals or fulfill arbitrary personal desires.

 For those hoping to avoid compromise, it is thus worst of all possible worlds: education remains incredibly resource-intensive for every parent, even as most have lost a sense of what education is for. Compromise is barely even recognized as such. Even in cases where there remains a sense of obligation—often simply inherited from prior generations, or for cultural reasons—to send one’s children to Catholic school, this consideration is quickly offset by high costs, and (frankly) mediocre education in the faith. Every family just muddles through somehow, coming up with their own theory of what their children need along the way. 

This is a disaster. The very concept of education is important enough to the definition of Matrimony itself that Saint Thomas says that “’Offspring’ [as the primary object of marriage] signifies not only the begetting of children, but also their education, to which as its end is directed the entire communion of works that exists between man and wife as united in marriage”. To compromise a child’s education to the point that the very end in sight is lost is, in a way, to do the same to a family or to a marriage itself. 

What, then, are some of the truths of education that we may have lost somewhere in the haze of contemporary culture? Pope Pius XI’s 1929 encyclical Divini Illius Magistri aims to instruct the faithful on Christian education, and contains many quotable bits of guidance on this point: 

“[I]t is the inalienable right as well as the indispensable duty of the Church, to watch over the entire education of her children, in all institutions, public or private, not merely in regard to the religious instruction there given, but in regard to every other branch of learning and every regulation in so far as religion and morality are concerned.”

And: “The so-called ‘neutral’ or ‘lay’ school, from which religion is excluded, is contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist in practice; it is bound to become irreligious.”

And: “[T]he frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed…is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone…with special precautions.”

And: “It is therefore as important to make no mistake in education, as it is to make no mistake in the pursuit of the last end, with which the whole work of education is intimately and necessarily connected.”

Preceding him, and directed specifically towards the American faithful, the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 wrote: “we not only exhort Catholic parents with paternal affection, but we command them with all the authority in our power to procure a truly Catholic education for their dear children…[and] to defend and secure them from the dangers of secular education.”

One could continue quote-mining and compile quite the florilegium of Church guidance from throughout history, but, of course, out-of-context quotes are quite the opposite of the goal. What these quotes actually point to is the fact that there exists a robust and integrated philosophy and theology of education that the Church has already developed which, to put it in stark terms, is almost entirely unknown to Catholics today. 

What can be done to ameliorate the situation? It is certainly a bleak one, and the solution is perhaps not so clear. Many encyclicals (not just Divini) have generally broad scopes which articulate holistic visions of a more Catholic society. Our age is not really one conducive to holistic visions of anything. The sorts of Catholic communities in which such educational visions could be disseminated and then developed are generally constituted by some number of like-minded families in a 60-mile radius who see each other once per week after driving on the freeway for 45 minutes. It’s all very fragmentary. 

Even for Catholics eager to band together in order to school themselves (no pun intended) on the Church’s tradition on this subject, a great many difficult questions arise. Here is one: the most obvious and immediate instruction from Divini Illius Magistri, illustrated in the quotes above, would seem to be that parents ought to send their children to Catholic schools. But does this still apply when a huge number of such schools are, well, awful? The trope of the fallen-away Catholic who attended Catholic schools for 12 years and walked away with a grotesquely distorted understanding of the faith is almost a cliché at this point. The sorts of stories I have heard from various Catholics disillusioned by their time in such institutions are somehow even worse than if I had heard them about public schools; at least in that case, one knows they are in “enemy territory”. 

Certain parents, faced with this obvious truth and seeking an alternative, turn towards certain do-it-yourself alternatives, and their more developed offshoots: homeschooling, dedicated homeschool co-ops, and even online collaboratives that let like-minded families congregate and learn over distance. I know many parents that participate in and develop these endeavors, and I know still more young Catholics who have been brought up with them, and indeed, brought up to be intelligent, well-rounded, virtuous and faithful. There can be no illusion, though, that this alternate ecosystem can represent any kind of ideal. The Pope’s quotes above indicate exactly why: education of the youth is to be ultimately guided by the Church, and more precisely, the Ordinary of the diocese. The buck cannot stop with a triumvirate of moms, as talented as they may be. We are Catholics, and not Protestants for a reason. And indeed, when there is no hierarchical guidance, there can be no guarantee for any particular child that they are being well-formed in the faith. The tragic and irresponsible homeschools quite obviously exist; they are simply going to be ones that you haven’t heard about. 

Other Catholic parents turn towards existing institutions. Perhaps they find the idea of a normal public school too gauche, but there are options which, at first blush, give the appearance of being “Catholic-lite”. Recent decades have seen a new blossoming of non-sectarian classical schools which are—well, I’m not actually sure the common thread that ties them all together. (Various parents I’ve talked to with students at these schools seem remarkably unable to clearly articulate what, precisely, constitutes a “classical education”, and why it is of such vital importance. I’m not trying to be mean; I am sure someone could give me such a speech, and convincingly! But it is clear that most parents are just grasping about for something, anything, that seems better than the other choices at hand.) In any case, such schools, it must be said, at least have an ethos, which is more than can be said for most run-of-the-mill public schools, and are drawing on various tested traditions. 

But these schools explicitly do not, and by design cannot, draw upon the Tradition of the Church. As the Holy Father wrote, such schools, in the end, are fundamentally and irreformably incomplete; in trying to split the difference between a creedal school and the pluralistic public ones, they are “bound to become irreligious”. And if that is the final option for Catholic families, the battle is already lost: the Catholic schools (generally none of them are doing all that well financially) will close, and Catholic families will find themselves unable to ever return to the ideal which Pius XI put forth as a necessity for education of our children. The door will be closed; compromise will have collapsed into defeat, and who knows how much worse the next compromise chosen by struggling parents will be? 

I would not dare to tell any parent about what their duty is in a specific case with regards to the education of their children. I would merely remind all parents that the issue is a matter of the utmost importance, for both their children and their friends’ children, and their children’s children, and so on. Problems of collective action, of course, are not easy—nobody wants to be the first family to send their child away from their friends to a decent-but-not-great parochial school; nobody wants to be the first teacher in their cohort to take a position at one.  But such collective action problems become much easier when they are recognized as vitally important, and indeed, jointly recognized as such. 

The faithful therefore must talk about such things together. They must read what their Church has already taught about the instruction of their children. And if there are no schools that befit Catholic children, the faithful must aim to build (and indeed, rebuild) them. There is no other option.